Nine months ago, Pat Sheedy walked out of prison after spending more than two and a half years locked up for trying to fund his decades-long gambling addiction through various scams. 

After winning his first bet as a teenager, he quickly fell into a cycle of working, borrowing and stealing to make sure he could place his next bet. Long periods of abstinence - at one point he went 12 years without gambling - followed, but it wasn't until finally being given a custodial sentence in 2020 that he began to really reflect on the damage he was doing to other people. 

Pat speaks to Richie just a few hundred metres down the road from where he placed his first bet in Limerick city today and explains why prison was the best thing that ever happened to him, describes the life of a compulsive gambler and how he's tried to make amends with the victims of his scams since being released last August.

Episode is a Second Captains podcast. 

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